New seating at Giants Stadium is displacing long-time ticket holders

Rich Riemer is going to miss the old neighborhood. For 33 years — most of his life — he has cheered and cried and celebrated and cursed there with the same group of friends.

On a recent sunny Sunday, the 49-year-old Riemer caught up with Pat Heaney, an old pal whose late father had been a friend of Riemer’s dad. He stood next to longtime friend John Morris as Morris was congratulated on the birth of his first grandchild. He joked around with teenagers Robert and Brian Zeller, brothers who have been laughing with the larger-than-life Riemer since they were little boys.

Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-LedgerRich Riemer, center, watches the game with his nephew Brian Allen, left, and Nancy Nally from section 132. Longtime Giants fans face possibly their final season together in old Giants Stadium. But with the new stadium on the horizon, the residents of this football community are going their separate ways.

There were hugs and handshakes in and around Section 132, on the 40-yard line on the visiting team’s side of Giants Stadium. For these fans, Section 132 is the neighborhood, the place where friends gather just eight times or so a year, as their fathers and uncles did. Their common bond is football, but their relationships encompass much more.

"I’ve been to funerals, to weddings. The week after my father died in 1992, at the next home game, I must have picked up 30 to 40 Mass cards," said Riemer, who sits in the section’s 13th row. "It was really touching."

The neighborhood has only this season left. In a scene playing out all over Giants Stadium — where sellout crowds of 70,000-plus have cheered for their team for more than three decades — groups of fans who share little but their passion for Big Blue will disperse, because of the coming of the personal seat license.

PSLs are being sold by the Giants to help finance the construction of the $1.6 billion stadium they will share with the Jets when it opens in the Meadowlands in the fall. Although new to the metropolitan area, PSLs have become commonplace in the National Football League as a way for team owners to raise money. The licenses, which give their holders the right to buy season tickets at the new stadium, cost $1,000 to $20,000 and are required for every seat in the stadium.

The PSL is throwing a wrench in the traditional order, in which loyalty and seniority have long determined where Giants fans sit. As long as the Riemers and others bought the tickets each year to 10 home games (including preseason contests) and, more recently, a parking pass for each game, they kept their spots. If better seats became available, ticket holders with the most seniority were offered the upgrade.

In theory, that’s also what is happening with the new stadium. But the added cost of the PSLs is forcing some fans to bow out. And in the sections nearest the field, the decision is breaking up groups that have been together since Eisenhower was in the White House and the original "West Side Story" was lighting up Broadway.

Many fans say the very nature of the game experience is changing.

"You’ll lose the legacy of what it means to be a Giants fan," said Joseph McHugh of Stamford, Conn., sitting next to his father, Charlie, who has been a season ticket holder since 1962. The McHughs will leave their stadium neighborhood after this year, since the PSLs for their pair of lower-level seats near the end zone will cost $10,000 each.

Across the aisle in Section 115, where the PSLs are $5,000, Scott Plant of Scotch Plains is happy he can afford to keep seats that were originally his father’s. Still, in a world where seniority rules, he said it’s not fair that so many fans are being forced to move.

"The loyal fans that have been here have been forgotten," he said, shaking his head. Many of the most senior ticket holders sit in the sections with licenses of $20,000. "That’s way out of the common man’s reach."

THE GANG FROM QUEENS

It wasn’t always this way. When the Giants, longtime tenants of Yankee Stadium, moved into their new venue in East Rutherford, Riemer’s father, Rich Sr., and his buddies — "eight knuckleheads from Queens," as Riemer describes them — kept their seats together because the seats were all under the name of one of them, Tommy Curley. When the original ticket holders passed away, their extended families — from East Windsor and Clifton and Long Island — took over the seats.

They also adopted game-day traditions. Riemer, for example, owns the first three seats in Row 13, but he actually uses 6, 7 and 8. When he first started going with his dad, Riemer explains, his father thought he would be safer in seat 8, which was up against a pole in the old Yankee Stadium. So the Riemers switched with Bob Gagel, who moved to the aisle seat. When the group moved to Giants Stadium, Gagel kept his place. "Mr. Gagel liked the aisle seat, and you weren’t getting in his way," Riemer says with a chuckle.

"It’s a lifestyle, being a Giants fan," Riemer says. "It’s something my family did on Sundays. We went to church and we went to the Giants game."

Heaney, 57, sits across the aisle from Riemer’s crowd. Heaney’s father, Thomas, became a season ticket holder in 1959, and Heaney says his reverence for his father is part of the reason he bought the licenses for two seats in the new stadium. "I would have been cutting off my nose to spite my face," he said. "I’ve been doing this since I was 8."

Heaney, from Branchburg, feels fortunate he can afford the great location in the new venue. But when he looks around the neighborhood, he’s not sure who will be there next year. Lynn and her brother are staying, he says, pointing to his right. Not sure about John, he says about a group to his left. And Riemer will be moving upstairs, he notes.

"We’re all the children of fathers who originally bought the seats," he said. "We’re like an extended family. Part of the fun of the game is seeing everybody."

For the first time in a generation, the Giants are advertising season tickets to the general public. The team has plowed through the waiting list, which had been 20,000 names deep before ballooning to 140,000 about five years ago. (When the Giants introduced a Stub Hub-like ticket marketplace, participants were required to join the season tickets waiting list.)

In addition to the PSLs, Giants fans face rising ticket prices. This season, as in 2008, seats cost $80 in the upper level and $105 in the mezzanine. Prices for next season include $85 in the terrace level (with a PSL of $1,000) and $160 at field level (with a $20,000 PSL). Those seats are sold out.

The more expensive club seats are still available, for $700 per game at field level (with a PSL of $20,000) and $250 to $500 at mezzanine level (with PSLs from $7,500 to $12,500).

Comparatively, the Jets are charging $4,000 to $25,000 for each license, but they are selling 27,000 upper-deck seats with no licenses.

Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-LedgerWhile tailgating in the parking lot, Frank Von Rosendahl leads a cheer by forming the leter S as he spells Giants with a Simpons doll.

Many, like Brie Vonrosendahl, a 22-year-old Giants fan from Verona, have been on the waiting list for tickets for most of their lives. The daughter of Giants fans, Vonrosendahl learned to drive in the stadium’s empty parking lots on the mornings of game days. Her parents signed her up for season tickets when she was 5 or 6 ("We figured she’d take care of us," says her mom, Paula), and she finally got the call several months ago. But the offer was for seats costing $400, and with $7,500 license fees.

"That’s ridiculous," she said.

FIRST DIBS

Giants spokesman Pat Hanlon said the team has worked hard to keep its extended family happy. The new stadium will have 82,500 seats — an increase of about 5,000 — and every current season ticket holder was given first dibs on the new venue. Hanlon said about 90 percent of current accounts have purchased licenses for next year, a statistic many fans attending last month’s home opener found hard to believe.

"We priced it so that our current season ticket holders would have a number of options to consider," Hanlon said.

Hanlon said the team is pleased with the progress of ticket sales, particularly given the turbulent economy. The Giants expect to be sold out by the start of next season, and Hanlon believes most fans are content. "We wanted everyone currently in Giants Stadium to have a chance to move into the new building," he said. "That objective was achieved."

But Adrian Persico is giving up his seats out of disgust. The retired doctor from Long Island says he has been a ticket holder for 46 of his 87 years.

"I gave them a lot of money in the ’60s and ’70s, when they stunk," said Persico, whose seats, which he shares with his sons Adrian and Alan, are near midfield behind the Giants bench. Next year, the same seats would cost him $56,000 in license and ticket fees, he said. Persico has received three calls from Giants management trying to get him to move to the new stadium, he said, but he’s not going. He said he requested midfield seats in the upper deck, where the licences cost less.

"They said they’ll accommodate me but they can’t promise a location. Could be all the way at the top, all the way in the corner," he said. "I’m very disappointed. I’ll go buy a high-definition TV and stay home."

Meanwhile, the descendants of Tommy Curley, Ed Morris and Rich Riemer Sr. will all be back next season — tailgating together and then cheering their team with the same enthusiasm.

They just won’t be cheering from the same place.

John Morris, who is keeping his two seats on the 40-yard line, has already invited Riemer to use his second ticket for next season’s home opener. From the 40-yard line, the two will honor their history and the men who taught them how to be Giants fans.